Are we going to war again? Cuz That would put the brakes on my government paid education before I even figured out where I want to register (unless it was one of those Air wars we're so fond of...). Not that I have any knee-jerk, leftist, granola eatin' hippie aversion to killin' anything in the name of God, Country and Mom's Apple Pie...I was just hoping to learn a useful trade as well.

yeah, see, saddam's evil so we really need to attack before election day he develops a nuclear bomb.

Has anyone pinned down the exact moment when Saddam Hussein was switched from the Good Dictators list to the Bad Dictators list?

He was never a Good Dictator. You must have him confused with someone else. The CIA under Bush Sr. had *nothing* to do with putting him in power.

I don't think you can pinpoint an exact moment; certainly Iran-Contra was an indication that the Reagan Administration was becoming a bit less extreme in supporting Iraq, but that was also a payoff for holding off on the hostage release.

I think it really was the invasion of Kuwait that tipped the scales; not because Saddam was being a power-hungry Hitler clone (if he'd annexed a couple of nearby countries with no oil we'd have encouraged him, most likely), but because Bush didn't want Iraq's share of the oil market to get any bigger--that might have made it harder for the puppet government in Saudi Arabia to control oil prices, hurting W's business.

Ok, I admit that's unrealistically cynical... Bush Sr. is smart enough to have known that W was going to run his business into the ground with no help from OPEC market manipulation, and I'm sure he already had the plan in place to bail him out and get him into the, uh, highly profitable baseball business